Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

On July 31, 2014, a psychiatric assessment
ruled Justin Bourque fit to stand trial. Two months earlier, Bourque had enacted a
lethal campaign lasting 30 hours against law enforcement officers in his
hometown of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

Moncton outsources its policing to the area
branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - the Codiac RCMP. So when residents
saw Bourque walk down the street and head into some nearby woods - dressed in
camouflage and heavily armed with two long guns, ammunition, and a
crossbow - RCMP officers answered their 911 calls.

After entering the small wood, Bourque made
his way toward a cluster of houses, where he ambushed the officers responding
to the call. For the next two days officers searched for the elusive gunman
while the city went into lockdown. In total, Bourque shot five RCMP officers,
killing three and wounding two. It was one of the worst tragedies to befall the
nation-wide RCMP.

The fact that this crime took place in a
particularly mild-mannered part of a famously polite country was much noted by
media - the town was described as ‘tranquil’- the
kind of place where things
like this don’t happen. So if it was happening in Moncton, did that mean
that American-style gun violence was creeping across the border into Canada?

Despite the media and area residents’ shock
at the seeming incongruity of such a crime happening in Moncton, New Brunswick
is no stranger to violent, shocking crimes. In 2005, the decapitated body of 74-year
old country musician Fred Fulton was found in Minto, New Brunswick. Fulton’s
wife Verna Decarie was also found stabbed to death. Twenty-two year-old Gregory Despres was
quickly identified
as a person of interest, having been involved in a recent conflict with the
murdered couple, whose property neighbored his.

Apprehended in Massachusetts a day after
the bodies were found, the case briefly made international headlines when it
was revealed that Despres had managed to cross the Canadian border with the US
into Maine carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, knife, brass knuckles, and a
chainsaw that appeared to be smeared with blood. The day after his arrest, Despres
told a state court judge that he was affiliated with NASA and had been
travelling to a Marine Corps base in (land-locked) Kansas.

Both Bourque and Despres emulated (in
Despres’ case, likely hallucinated) a commando-style tactical campaign. Yet
while Despres’ case horrified, it was so utterly bizarre - so clearly out of left
field - as to allow some sense of removal from his crime. By contrast, Bourque
turned his flair for the quintessentially Canadian pastimes of spending time in
the wilderness and hunting, against another, beloved symbol of Canadian
culture - the Mounties.

In the weeks since Bourque’s ambush and the
subsequent manhunt there has been relatively little discussion of the role
Canada’s gun control policy may have played in this tragedy.

In recent years, debates about gun control
have centered on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ultimately successful campaign
to end the Canadian Long-gun Registry (a registry for non-restricted firearms such as rifles and shotguns used for
hunting) which was dismantled in 2012. The registry was instituted in 1995 in
response to the 1989 Montréal Massacre. However Harper and other critics of the registry
have repeatedly characterized it as wasteful and
ineffective, often citing the auditor general's 2002 report that the cost had risen from $2 million to closer
to $1 billion.

The registry also appeared to be of limited
use, given that in 2011, its final year of existence, 11% of killings were
committed with registered long guns, whereas illegal weapons that could never
be registered (such as sawed-off shotguns and machine guns) were used in 12% of
killings.

The failings of
the gun registry aside, there remains a certain incongruity between the
Conservative party's desire to be frugal on issues relating to crime prevention,
and their enthusiastic allocation in 2010 of $9 billion to build new prisons.
When the party’s logic for such a generous expansion of the prison system was
questioned, Conservative MP and then President of the Treasury, Stockwell Day, rather ominously replied, " We're very concerned...
about the increase in the amount of unreported crimes that surveys clearly show
are happening."

It
is a sad state of affairs when a nation's citizens are more comfortable
reporting crimes committed against them to a stranger conducting a survey by
phone, than to their local police department. So maybe the
abolition of the gun registry was about more than trimming the fat: maybe in
the Consevatives’ worldview it all makes sense. After all, in a shadowy land
where only a fraction of the crime being committed is making it to the courts,
who wouldn’t want easier access to a firearm?

Moncton is a pleasant, if somewhat
unremarkable town. The strong presence of Acadian francophone culture - 30% of
its inhabitants speak French as their first language - brings the place a
particular vibrancy, with Moncton operating as a sort of focal point of Acadian
culture in Canada. If it’s answers to Justin Bourque's lethal attack on the
RCMP officers you want, you won’t find them on the mean streets of Moncton, in
part because you won’t find those mean streets.

The province of New Brunswick’s largest
town is Saint John - about an hour and a half’s drive from Moncton, and my
hometown. While Saint John, too, would struggle to come up with anything that
fits a popular definition of a ‘mean street’, both Moncton and Saint John have
areas of poverty, and one thing that is in evidence on the streets of Saint John
is mental illness.

In 1996 the Atlantic Health Sciences
Corporation - responsible for the administration of health care facilities across
southern New Brunswick - decided to change their approach to mental health care
from a facility-based model to a community-based one. This involved closing
Canada’s oldest long-term mental health care facility, Centracare, and building a
new, smaller facility with a reduced inpatient capacity.

While the aims of community-based models
are laudable and can be highly effective - the integrated living communities for
people with learning disabilities run by L’Arche
being one example - transitioning people who have been living in a care facility
back into the community can also leave people isolated and vulnerable. Looking
at the number of people who appear to be struggling with issues related to
mental health, substance abuse, or both, in the city centre of Saint John in
the years since Centracare reduced its capacity, it seems that there is an
important step missing in the path from facility-based care to helping people
become productive members of society.

Family
members of RCMP killer Justin Bourque have spoken out, saying they saw a marked
difference in his personality in the months leading up to his crime. In an interview with The Globe and
Mail,
Bourque’s sister Sophie stated that she became aware of the effects that
substance abuse was having, as well as a paranoia not previously in keeping
with her brother’s character: “He started reading a lot
about conspiracy theories, and he wasn’t as mentally stable as he used to be….
He kind of got paranoid that somebody was going to take his guns away.” In the affidavit in support of a
psychiatric assessment filed by Bourque’s father Victor, he described
how he had seen his son go into a state of "serious depression, emotional
and financial instability" following his move out of the family home and
into a trailer park approximately 18 months before.

Among the evidence heard during Gregory
Despres’ trial was testimony from his mother stating that in his late teens
Despres’ behaviour changed dramatically. Jeannie Despres described this change,
stating
at the trial: "At
times he seemed to think he was involved with the Hells Angels group or a
military faction, or things that I had no knowledge of, or didn't understand
where these ideas were coming from."

Thinking of Victor Bourque’s observations on
his son’s behaviour, and the testimony of Gregory Despres’ mother, I asked a
New Brunswick doctor working in general practice what options the provincial
system provides for people who may be concerned for the mental health of adult
family members. I was told that the system has more or less thrown its hands up
in resignation because unless someone requests help, or does something to
endanger the public or themselves, there’s just nothing it can do.

Although Justin Bourque has been declared
fit to stand trial, it seems clear to many of those around him that he was
going off the rails.

Canada’s free healthcare and its designation of gun ownership and use as being a privilege
rather than a right are two of the policies most often cited to justify our
self-estimation as an enlightened society. When gun crimes reminiscent of
American-style violence happen in Canada, we often satisfy ourselves with a few
op-eds comparing our statistics on gun control to America’s and - comforted that
we still have far less gun crime than the US - we fail to penetrate the issue
further. But there is more crime in Canada than gun crime, and in our national
fixation on comparing ourselves with America, we allow the US to dictate our
own, national conversation. In the wake of such tragedies we must consider not
only gun control, but what kind of healthcare system will serve us best, too.

As the cases of Gregory Despres and Justin
Bourque demonstrate, allowing people who may be in need of mental health
services to self-identify through violence is dangerous and lazy. We must open
a dialogue on the quality of services our communities offer on mental health
care issues to match our ongoing debate on gun control. Until we take this
step, the most enlightened policies on weapons will continue to come up short,
and our famous healthcare system will continue failing some of the citizens who
may need it most.

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.